Use Your Audience To Supercharge Your Marketing

Where can a business or product go wrong? In my experience one place is in the marketing of said business or product — either because the product was marketed incorrectly like using the wrong marketing approach (selling on price vs value, etc), marketing it to the wrong people (not clearly defining and understanding who your audience is), or using the wrong channels to market (which can be a subset of not clearly knowing who your audience is). Great marketers know that they can use their audience to supercharge their marketing efforts.

To me though, it all starts with knowing who your ideal customer is and why your product/service/business can benefit them.

Only once you have really clearly understood your audience are you going to be able to reach them in a way that can influence them to buy, which will push your needle in the direction you wish it to go.

Most marketers think about their audience as soon as they start to think about a new marketing program or launching a new product but I like to suggest revisiting that every so often. It helps us to reframe our thinking and retrain ourselves to be customer centric and not product centric.

Here are things that I suggest you take some time to answer any time you revisit your marketing.

Who is my audience? What challenges are they facing? Be really really super specific. Riches are in the niches!
What does success look like to my ideal customer?
In an ideal world, how will their problem be solved and managed long term?
Can my product help them solve their issues? What benefits will be realized after using my product?
How can I help them with identifying the best solutions to their challenges? What marketing channels are most effective to them (phone, email, social, content, direct/conferences, etc)?
Then answers to these questions will be telling. They’ll help you to re-evaluate if your marketing approach is customer-centric or not, and help you realign to make sure that you’re doing everything with your customers best interest in mind.

From there, I recommend the following:

Go deep on your product/service. Just like before, I have five questions you can ask yourself (and write these down! Like actually write them down. With a pen. There’s something that happens when you get pen and paper out and start writing.

OK, the questions:

What problems am I solving with my product/service?
What are the best features of my product/service (as seen through the eyes of my ideal customer)?
What is my products “killer feature?” … AKA “Why is my product different than the competition?” or “What is the biggest value-add that we offer?”
What content types and marketing channels are most effective in showing off my product (e.g. video, long-form content, social media, etc)?
What is my sales process like? How do we actually convert these people into customers?
Based on your answers to these questions you can make adjustments to your messaging, targeting, content types and your marketing strategy overall. You’ll have a more clear view on the marketplace and on what your audience needs which will help you to make sure you’re not just doing the same old thing and hoping for results.